Internet Architecture Board (IAB) H. Flanagan
Request for Comments: 7994 RFC Editor
Category: Informational December 2016
ISSN: 2070-1721
Requirements for Plain-Text RFCs
Abstract
In 2013, after a great deal of community discussion, the decision was
made to shift from the plain-text, ASCII-only canonical format for
RFCs to XML as the canonical format with more human-readable formats
rendered from that XML. The high-level requirements that informed
this change were defined in RFC 6949, "RFC Series Format Requirements
and Future Development". Plain text remains an important format for
many in the IETF community, and it will be one of the publication
formats rendered from the XML. This document outlines the rendering
requirements for the plain-text RFC publication format. These
requirements do not apply to plain-text RFCs published before the
format transition.
Status of This Memo
This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is
published for informational purposes.
This document is a product of the Internet Architecture Board (IAB)
and represents information that the IAB has deemed valuable to
provide for permanent record. It represents the consensus of the
Internet Architecture Board (IAB). Documents approved for
publication by the IAB are not a candidate for any level of Internet
Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 7841.
Information about the current status of this document, any errata,
and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at
http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7994.
Flanagan Informational [Page 1]RFC 7994 Plain-Text RFCs December 2016Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2016 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
(http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
publication of this document. Please review these documents
carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
to this document.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction ....................................................2
2. Character Encoding ..............................................4
3. Figures and Artwork .............................................4
4. General Page Format Layout ......................................4
4.1. Headers and Footers ........................................5
4.2. Table of Contents ..........................................5
4.3. Line Width .................................................5
4.4. Line Spacing ...............................................5
4.5. Hyphenation ................................................5
5. Elements from the xml2rfc v3 Vocabulary .........................5
6. Security Considerations .........................................6
7. References ......................................................6
7.1. Normative References .......................................6
7.2. Informative References .....................................7
IAB Members at the Time of Approval ................................8
Acknowledgements ...................................................8
Author's Address ...................................................8
1. Introduction
In 2013, after a great deal of community discussion, the decision was
made to shift from the plain-text, ASCII-only canonical format for
RFCs to XML as the canonical format [XML-ANNOUNCE]. The high-level
requirements that informed this change were defined in [RFC6949],
"RFC Series Format Requirements and Future Development". Plain text
remains an important format for many in the IETF community, and it
will be one of the publication formats rendered from the XML. This
document outlines the rendering requirements for the plain-text RFC
publication format. These requirements do not apply to plain-text
RFCs published before the format transition.
The Unicode Consortium defines "plain text" as "Computer-encoded text
that consists only of a sequence of code points from a given
standard, with no other formatting or structural information.
Flanagan Informational [Page 2]RFC 7994 Plain-Text RFCs December 2016
Plain-text interchange is commonly used between computer systems that
do not share higher-level protocols." [UNICODE-GLOSSARY]. In other
words, plain-text files cannot include embedded character formatting
or style information. The actual character encoding, however, is not
limited to any particular sequence of code points.